AEW Battle of the Belts III review now up!

 So today, with my review of AEW Battle of the Belts III, I complete my goal of having written something every day this week, including the weekend! My AEW reviews are a special thing I do for Patrons - you can find the new one (which to be honest is mainly about how much I love watching Jamie Hayter beat people up) and all my previous reviews on my Patreon. Highlights include: the aforementioned Jamie Hayter simping, a firm commitment to taking every opportunity to slag off Jay Lethal, a section where I talk about watching a match between Mark Haskins and Gabriel Kidd while on edibles, and my ongoing efforts to come up with parody titles for Wednesday's Quake at the Lake event, which, for my money, reaches its apotheosis in this one. Check it out! 

I'm a transgender woman and I don't like Drag Queen Story Time

...but before the Daily Mail beat a path to my door waving chequebooks, I think it's important to make something clear: the reasons I dislike this popular family activity have nothing to do with the reasons queerphobic right-wing twats hate it. Those guys - who, incidentally, when investigated at even the most cursory level, usually turn out to be a right den of diddlers themselves - claim their objections to Drag Queen Story Time are based on the idea of defending kids from sexual predators. Which is bollocks for one simple reason: predators don't try to stand out. Yes, there was a man in a frock who used to come to my school and abuse kids, but he'd have got thrown out of the priesthood for wearing make-up. Predators seek camouflage, and as every trans woman finds out when she makes her first experiments with cosmetics, looking like a drag queen is exceedingly poor camouflage. 

Wow, they really seem like they wanna defend kids, huh?

These people will then usually try to make some kind of argument based on the idea that DQST is about (big scare quotes) 'normalising sexual deviancy' to, in some insidious way, soften kids up for the nonces. I'm not really sure how this is supposed to work, mainly because, like most normal adults, I can tell the difference between someone who happens to be gay and someone who's a paedophile. To be honest, it doesn't really matter. These people literally get given their arguments by genitally-obsessed freaks online who have literally publicly tweeted about how they have a deliberate agenda to conflate queer people with paedophilia. That this anti-drag agitation is a smear campaign is obvious. 

And while it's going on I will, obviously, defend the right of people to attend and enjoy Drag Queen Story Time by any means necessary. But I'm going to be angry the entire time because, as I say, I don't like Drag Queen Story Time myself. In fact, in all honesty, I find it cringe.

And I find it so because it seems, to me, to be based on a philosophy of queer assimilationism that I have no time for. It is, frankly, an appeal for queer people to be involved in reproductive futurism. This is the motive which bigots consider so sinister and call 'normalisation': I call it cringe and see it as collaboration with the forces that would normalise us. 

'Reeproductive futurism', a concept outlined by the literary theorist Lee Edelman, can be summed up as

The horizon of politics for reproductive futurism is the child. The purpose of politics in a reproductive futurist framework is to make a better world for our children. Edelman says that one of the freedoms we enjoy as queers is the freedom to reject this idea, to refuse to collaborate with our own suppression in order to create a better world for this hypothetical innocent, pure, hopeful, naive, yearning, grasping, deeply annoying little twat. Let the heterosexuals shackle their lives to reproducing themselves like the monkeypox virus: us queers get to live in the now!

This is, of course, a deliberate, dramatic detournement of the homophobic idea that queer people are unnatural because we cannot reproduce, a notion which has seen us constructed at various times as sinister or tragic depending on the biases of whoever's doing the constructing. A good example of reproductive futurism being used to other queer people is the failed Gladiator Sharron Davies' tweet saying she is 'fed up of drag shows' (which rather begs the question of who is kidnapping her and forcing her to go to them, but let's put that aside for the moment): 

Women - real women in fully paid up tervert Sharron's view, not like us filthy trannies - are seen, in Davies' formulation, as having value only in as much as they conform to reproductive futurism. They are doing the unpaid labour on which capitalism relies for social reproduction, 'rushing out a wholesome dinner, doing the laundry and cleaning', all the while bearing the effluvia of child-rearing, those 'leaky boobs', with an almost heroic pride ('boobs', it would seem, are much on the mind of terverts: if they aren't, like big-time loser Alison Bailey, thinking about the breasts of teenage girls 'feeling a lover's caress' they are, like LGB Alliance founder [and big-time heterosexual] Ann Sinnott, shoving their tits in a six-year-old's mouth. These are the people, remember, that the likes of the Daily Mail consider the moral superiors of you and I.).Incredibly, Davies is so intent on demonstrating her commitment to reproductive futurism here that she even effaces her own achievements: are women winning swimming medals in Sharron's world? Like Hell: they're whipping up a feast for the man of the house and the 2.4 children instead. 'Enough of the stereotypes' indeed!

(If you want to see another take on Davies' diatribe, which locates it in the different, though linked, discourse of heteropessimism, see Dr Eleanor Janega's excellent blog about it.)

But the thing that gets on my hormonally-grown tits about Drag Queen Story Time is that at its core, for all the fulminations of the likes of Davies or the Nazi nonces at Patriotic Alternative, it, too, is an act of collaboration with reproductive futurism. Because it, too, is centred on children, and more to the point on children constituted as the political horizon of the future. Indeed, one of the ideas behind it is not that far removed from the paranoid ramblings of the weirdos who protest against it: DQST is about normalising gender variance for kids, about letting them know gender expression and identity is a space of possibilities instead of a Black Iron Prison you get assigned to when a sleep-deprived midwife has a dekko at your neonatal crotch and ticks one of two boxes. As someone who would have avoided a lot of unnecessary suffering if that had been demonstrated to me earlier in life, I think that's a good thing. As people who like to make gender-variant folks the whipping bis for their own florid psychosexual neuroses, the anti-drag arseholes think otherwise. And they phrase their objections in terms of - what else? - reproductive futurism. It's just in their view equipping the children of the future with a greater awareness of the fluidity of gender identity and expression is dangerous, because they intend to keep the political horizon of the future as limited as possible. 

But let me state my position: 

But not like, in that way. Who do you think I am, Dane Cook?

Seriously, I don't care about your kids. I don't care that they broke their elbow, or they didn't. or whatever. I don't actually believe that children are the political horizon of the future, because I still think the best assessment of that political horizon is the opening sentence of Neoreaction: A Basilisk - 'Let us assume that we are fucked.' I feel sorry for kids who are going to have to grow up and find a way of surviving in that fucked world, but I think at a time when scientists are saying we need to start thinking seriously about facing the reality of human extinction, holding hands and singing that we believe the children are our future is laughable. 

And the thing is that that's what Drag Queen Story Time does. It may hope to influence that future in a more queer-friendly direction, but to do so it's forced to collaborate with a cultural complex which is deeply, structurally, heteronormative. It looks to me like queers centring our appeal to the hetero crowd on how helpful we can be to them in their child-rearing. Drop the kids off at Drag Queen Story Time while you and your DH ('darling hubby', come come, don't you know your vomit-inducing Mumsnet slang?) go and grab a coffee. We don't mind! It's what sad little eunuchs like us are here for! Looking after the kiddies for the real people! Nah. Fuck that. 

Obviously I am well aware I am in the minority on this. And I am not going to begrudge Queens a revenue stream in these troubled times, or Library Assistants the opportunity of holding events which will bring more people into the building and help get kids reading (yes, for all my fulmination against reproductive futurism I do think teaching kids to read is a good thing. How else are we going to teach them how much reproductive futurism sucks?). And while fascist scum are attacking these kinds of events I will defend them against attack with all my might (the amount of might this might amount to varies in terms of how I'm doing with my disability on any given day but I assure you it's non-zero). I just find it incredibly annoying to be forced to fight these fascist scum on a battleground I find so cringe.

But then, when these creeps are besieging libraries, hurling abuse and threatening to harm mothers, children, performers and library staff, my feelings aren't what's important. 

Report me to Prevent, you fascist cunts, I could use the publicity

 I went for a long walk yesterday. Which is to say, as regular readers of this blog will be aware, I went for multiple short walks interspersed with periods sitting on public benches trying to get my breath back. So I was very tired when I got home, and so I woke up later than usual this morning and, when I checked my Facebook messages, I learned that Tory leadership candidate (and Borrower) Rishi Sunak - a man who, you may recall, the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves compared at the dispatch box to both Ted Heath and Lewis Carroll - is planning to refer to Prevent, Britain's 'anti-terrorism strategy', those, and I quote Sunak himself specifically here, 'who are vocal in their hatred of our country'. 

What common factor could these three men share?

Further perusal of the article I quoted reveals that Tories in the Sunak camp (which in my mind is a bit like that episode of Doom Patrol where they're all living in improvised shelters on Cliff's Scalextric track because they've all been shrunkened down) are referring to their proposed offence as 'vilifying Britain', and that 'Any "vilification" of Britain would need to appear in written form or speech in order to qualify for Prevent'. 

To which all I have to say is have you read my last book? 

Clear enough for you?

In case you think that's a blip, rest assured I have continued to vilify this country in my work since then:

It's absurd that out of one side of his mouth Rishi Sunak will make noises about 'free speech' in the context of the trans 'debate' or when the speech in question is the racist speech of white Britons, and yet at the same time will talk about taking measures like this in case any gammon get upset at nasty people like me being mean about their flags. 

But who am I really kidding? We all know that I'm unlikely to arouse much interest at Prevent. Ask any black or brown Brit and they'll tell you: Prevent is an anti-Muslim programme. The Trojan Horse podcast established that pretty conclusively. And what was the UK response to that exposure? To get their lackeys in the media to run a bunch of cowardly, bootlicking pieces rubbishing the podcast's hosts for doing what they'd been too afraid to do, and commission a review of the Prevent programme led by Henry Jackson Society board member William Shawcross, which concluded, as it had no doubt been intended to from the start, that the problem with Prevent was that it wasn't Islamophobic enough.  

So of course this proposed 'don't hurt Britain's feelings, it is a smol bean and minor-coded' legislation will really be used as another way of tightening the noose around the neck of this country's black and brown community, criminalising them now for the act of simply speaking out against the fact that they face an onslaught of racist policy and policing from this Tory government - in a week when it emerged that London's Metropolitan Police - the same force which gave us Sarah Everard's murderer and rapist - seems to be operating a policy of strip-searching children, with the majority of those searched coming from a BAME background. 

And it's no surprise that it's Rishi Sunak making this proposal. Rishi Sunak, who never met a racist bully whose boot he wouldn't lick for personal advancement, once again selling out his fellow people of colour in a desperate attempt to appeal to the Tory headbangers who are all going to vote for Liz Truss anyway because despite the fact she's an inept, attention-seeking Maggie Thatcher cosplayer who nearly got us nuked by Russia once already, she's the white candidate and that is really all they care about. And Rishi knows that's all they care about, which is why he's trying to show he's a racist as they are. But only one BAME Tory MP has ever been able to work the Priti Hate Machine in a way that gets the Tory faithful going, and she didn't even run for leader (probably calculating, correctly, that even she couldn't ride the pick-me grift into Number 10). 

I would like to apologise to Rikishi and ONLY to Rikishi for making the above image.

Which in some ways is a shame, because in a way Rishi Sunak really is the perfect representative of Britain today: a short man who goes to preposterous lengths to conceal his lack of stature, aided by a state media apparatus that airs cartoons depicting him as Superman; a former Chancellor of the Exchequer who got a US green card to avoid paying UK taxes; a man compared to two different paedophiles as a matter of Parliamentary record; and most of all, a person of colour who sought advancement by proving to white people just how much he was willing to sell people like himself out to help them turn a profit, get their jollies, or just feel better about their wretched little lives. Yes, Rishi Sunak is perfect as Britain's representative to the rest of the world - because as a corrupt, self-important Hobbit who owes his success entirely to complicity with racism, he's practically a walking metaphor for this country. 

And if saying that counts as vilification, you better lock me up then, 'cause I ain't gonna stop saying it.

Right, here's your funny one for THIS year

 A spoken word group I'm a member of on Facebook is currently facing an infestation of Christbots spamming up the joint with links to their prosperity gospel bollocks. You'll know from past entries that I take a dim view of people trying to smuggle evangelicalism into spoken word or poetry. So I wrote this about it. 

The O.T. (Optimus Testament)

Excuse me, Sir, will you listen to a rhyme

telling you the Good News about Optimus Prime?

‘Freedom is the right of all sentient beings’

was the creed that He followed and applied in all things

but His life took a turn for the strange and dark

when He boarded a Cybertronian ship called The Ark

which flew across the galaxy and soon found berth

on a planet which one day we would all know as Earth.

There Prime slumbered, and He slept a lot,

so long He completely missed the Dinobots,

until carbon-based lifeforms with a taste for carbs

began proliferating and invented cars.

Crashed in a mountain, slept in a cave,

quality trucking was what Prime craved,

so He emerged from the hill with His Autobot allies

as sophisticated robots in vehicular disguise.

And soon Prime would learn that He wasn’t alone,

He’d been followed by some shifty dude called Megatron,

though ‘shifty’ is misspelling it ‘cause Megs was straight shitty,

destined to kill Prime one day in Autobot City,

though Optimus would then pass on the Matrix and its power

which in the hands of Rodimus would light our darkest hour.

So tell me good Sir, do you have the time

to hear the New Testament of Rodimus Prime?   

Given that, on average, I tend to write an actually funny poem once every five years or so, I look forward to amusing you all with another bit of light verse in 2027, as we cower from Raider attacks and contemplate killing each other for the water in our bodies a la Malcolm McDowell in Tank Girl. 

Enough of this tenderqueer bullshit, let's start being scary again

 

So everyone found out that Ana Mardoll works for Lockheed Martin and Twitter has been an amusing place for the last twenty-four hours. Well, as much as it can be these days, anyway. Reactions have fallen into two predictable camps: one group of people saying 'I told you so' and another faction decrying Mardoll's cancellation. Amusingly the Daily Mail has came down on Mardoll's side, at least inasmuch as it gives them a stick to beat the 'woke' with. But you see, here's the thing - 

I'm fucking sick of this bollocks. 

I had actually been following Ana Mardoll before all this happened, because I agreed with his opinion on a recent crappy, transphobic genderplague novel called The Men, in which wouldn't you know it, all the trans women magically disappear one morning along with the cis men. I agreed with Mardoll because all the information I saw about The Men, including extracts and plot summaries, and also elements of its author's previous questionable works, suggested to me that it was a pile of dogshit and certainly not a book anyone needs to read when Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, which is a much better genderplague novel, is out there. 

But I never really felt that comfortable following Mardoll because, well, he had a bloody picrew avatar, and I keep seeing takes from supposedly queer people on Twitter with picrew avatars which make my spook-radar go haywire. Something I noticed about these accounts was they seemed fixated on intra-community beef: trans women and trans men beefing over who was 'transmisogyny exempt', endless tenderqueer bollocks, 'no kink at pride' stuff, that kind of thing. I don't know if they come from one of the chan boards, from Russia or from the CIA (and obviously the degree to which those are three discrete things is an open question these days) but it seemed a lot like GamerGate and a lot like the shit we'd seen floating around online in the run-up to the 2016 election. They smelled like an op, these guys, and while I didn't immediately lump Mardoll in with them - well, I probably should have done that when he began arguing that it's ableist to expect writers to read, which seems to have been the take which led people to expose his connections to the merchants of death. But the thing is,

I am FUCKING sick of this BOLLOCKS.

It's just endlessly based on the idea that the way we will win liberation from cis hegemony is by being nice. By being reasonable. By showing that we can be trusted. It's queer centrism! It's respectability politics! And I'm sick of it!

I don't want a queer liberation that is entirely dependent on not spooking the straights. I like marching in my local Pride parade with people wearing bondage gear and pup hoods and I wouldn't bother going on a march which refused to include them because seeing 'kink at Pride' might scar the delicate minds of children because if seeing a man dressed in a latex animal costume is going to scar those kids then Batman's already done it, Freddy Wertham Jnr. When did us queers get so goddam soft?

Inevitably I blame social media, not for any of the obvious reasons but because social media led to what you might call the HRification of social life online. The structural nature of the big online platforms meant that the way of dealing with hate speech which they found most effective was algorithmic and based on certain trigger words, with a second level of (usually outsourced, more often than not horrendously traumatised) human oversight layered thinly on top. This meant that instead of racism, transphobia, etc being driven off the platforms the systems rewarded people who were sneaky about voicing their bigoted opinions, incentivising euphemism and mass-reporting instead of actual conversations. 

And frankly it's hard to see how social media companies operating in a capitalist society could do anything different. And unfortunately our society is too hooked on capitalism to enact the necessary regulation which would make the social networks work properly, so we're stuck with a situation where a bunch of companies are doing catastrophic damage to the discourse on an hourly basis because their fiduciary duty to their shareholders precludes them from hiring a sufficient number of sufficiently educated and emotionally intelligent moderators to give their sites a liveable culture. Given that we are currently dealing with a planetary situation in which those same fiduciary duties are creating a situation in which the actually existing atmosphere will soon become unliveable this is, well, not ideal. We could do with throwing our best minds at the problem of climate change, and if we don't have enough of them we could probably get a similar boost from hurling a shitload of second-rate intellects at the same problem, and either of those groups of intellects are likely to get better results if they haven't spent a decade training themselves like rats in Skinner boxes to run around online insulting people for dopamine hits and yes I am talking about myself in that last bit. 

The thing is, it is possible to build communities online but it requires an investment of time from real, actual humans that you only really get in fandoms, where people are used to giving up hours of their free time for no great financial reward. Barbelith, the message board I frequented most often in the pre-social media days, had a user-to-moderator ratio that a global behemoth like Facebook or Twitter would never be able to reproduce while still keeping their shareholders happy. And it could support that ratio because it occupied a particular niche - in Barbelith's case fans of Grant Morrison's comic book The Invisibles and other projects, and related topics (yes, obviously I know in theory 'related topics of The Invisibles' could mean literally everything but in practice you know what I mean) - which meant there was always going to be a limit on the number of people the site would cater to. So on Barbelith arguments over the edge cases of what language was acceptable from what users in what context really did become actual conversations in which everyone would eventually arrive at a position they were happy to abide by (well, that or flounce off in a strop after threatening to 'close the connectors' on the site through some occult means). Whereas with the social networking platforms there simply isn't time for that - everything becomes about how to appease the mods, or game the mods (and crucially in this situation the mods are truly, panoptically anonymous, unlike the mods of message boards who would most of the time be people you also regularly talked to on those same boards) or generally second-guess the mods, and the result is that people begin to internalise the idea that, just as on Twitter there is a way for you to just about communicate your meaning without getting mass-reported, there is also a way in which you can behave in the real world as a queer and not get in trouble and oh, honey,

no. 

There is no way of behaving which will keep you safe from the violence of cisheteropatriarchal white society. That violence is deep in the structures of this world. It is there in the fact that capitalism has robbed queers of online spaces where our elders could have effectively modelled the messy business of actually building community because giant, impersonal walled gardens where you are made to internalise a terror of stepping out of line and getting noticed by the mob can outcompete them, at least as long as they're propped up by venture capital money, as much as it is there in the mobs of fascist trash with records of child sex offences as long as their crappily-tattooed arms who stand outside libraries calling drag queens 'groomers'. This is not a violence that can be reasoned with. It is not a violence that can be persuaded. It is not a violence which can be befriended, though the more you look like the white cisgender men who benefit from it the more likely they might be to save you a seat on a later train to the camps. 

This violence can only be fought and it has to be fought all the time and it is impossible and it is demanded of us that we do the impossible. Certainly it is not fair. But we have to fight. We have to hold our shields and hold each other up and take what shots back that we can, and also, because they outnumber us, and because they have all the money, we have to cheat. We have to play dirty. And they will always play dirty because they outnumber us and have all the money. There is no agreement you can make as a queer person with cis, straight society that they will ever treat as anything other than conditional on their needs, their desires, their fragile feelings. 

So let's stop acting like there is. 

You cannot kill me in any way that matters

 

You can kill my body. You can sever

my consciousness from time and flesh

and glandular emotion. You can delete

my works from libraries and memories

and rumour. It won't make any difference.

You can kick us out of sports, and 

education, and entertainment (and good luck with that), and it won't matter, because 

trans children will keep being born,

among the births you'll force my brothers

and my sisters to endure, and you will

not stop that, because if you stay hung up

on high school biology, you will never

be able to program us cis and straight and

American down in the womb; and we

have slipped into subtext since Sappho,

making sure someone, in another time,

will remember us - and those kids are

going to find each other because we did,

one way or another, and when they do

they will laugh, as we do,

at every stupid thing you do 

to keep us from each other.

Memento Tory

You knew we were born to be ruled

by somebody as special as you,

whatever they told you in school,

because why would you be born to rule

otherwise? Why, why else would you rise

from your lowly station of yore

and the place you were placed in before

to the house with a ten on its door?

So enjoy it, your ride down the Mall,

the cronies you get to install,

the nation at last in your grasp, in your thrall,

but recall

that as sure as you rise, you will fall.

As sure as you strut, you will crawl.

As sure as you're sure 

your might will endure

you're going to lose, one and all.